Originally Posted by BenderRodriguez

Block hour modification question for discussion. I am hearing the pro TA people espousing the virtues of this in the event of a downturn and somewhat admitting that in a positive environment it is not as good as the language we have now (Although they come up a little short of saying exactly that.) In a sense I agree with them that if AF/KLM stops flying 747s and replaces them with 330s (kind of like what we are doing) that the block hour metric is better because we wouldn't have to start parking routes. 2 things come to mind on this.

When we pulled down flying in the Atlantic, AF/KLM did not which is primarily what resulted in the company being out of compliance. What this tells me is that our contract is not binding on AF/KLM, but rather only to the company's response to how THEY operate. This can be good, but more often than not is is a detriment to our Atlantic flying. First the bad.

We saw this in the form of our pulling down Atlantic flying with no reciprocity from AK/KLM. The other shoe would be if AF/KLM pulls down flying and then DAL "honors" our contract and does the same with OUR flying. Why should DAL be bound to do this? More importantly, why WOULD they want to? Honestly, I can't find any reason why they would unless there is something in the way the revenue sharing works out that because of our costs it is less profitable to DAL to carry more flying on our side of the ledger. Maybe that explains why we didn't continue to match the AF/KLM flying instead of pulling it down.

If we go to this block hour thing, we still have the same basic problem in that nothing we do will affect AF/KLM's operations, and what we have now done is given the company an out to drop our portion immediately to 49% with no upside guarantee. They say that "there is nothing to prevent the company from flying more than 50%" but there is nothing to compel them to do so either. As a matter of fact, since we are probably more "expensive" than AF/KLM pilots, that would make the margins from shared revenue from AF/KLM bigger than the portion of profits that DAL must share with them. In other words, (and obviously), doesn't it make more sense in a revenue sharing contract to have the lowest cost entity doing the lion's share of the work? Since we would have "the richest contract in aviation" that most certainly wouldn't be us.

So how do we fix this?

I think contracts that only allow the one way check valve to work in a downward vector are doing nothing for us in this regard. Notice I said "only" Those check valves need to ratchet UP our share of the flying rather than allow it to go down. We currently are flying (53%) of the block hours in this arrangement. Why do we open the valve and allow that number to go down, immediately? Take the snapshot, and keep it where it is. From this point forward, we fly 53% of the block hours. If AF/KLM stops flying across the Atlantic altogether, too bad for them. We ratchet up to 100%. This contract is about OUR interests, not AF/KLM's interests. I couldn't care less about them any more than I care about AAL or SWA.

Just my 2 cents.